Actress Diana Douglas Webster, the first wife of Kirk Douglas and mother of Michael Douglas, died Friday night at age 92.
Donald Webster, her third husband of 15 years, confirmed that she died in a hospital in Woodland Hills, California, after battling cancer.
“She was a person much beloved by everyone,” Webster said. “One of her greatest qualities was that she was always thinking of the other person.”
The matriarch of the Douglas acting clan was born Diana Love Dill in 1923 in Devonshire, Bermuda, the youngest of six children in a prominent and wealthy old-line family.
Her father, Col. Thomas Melville Dill, was a prominent Bermudan lawyer, politician and soldier who served as the British territory’s attorney general. Her mother, Ruth Rapalje Neilson, traced her lineage back to the last Dutch governor of New York, Peter Stuyvesant, according to “Crazy Rich: Power, Scandal, and Tragedy Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty,” an unauthorized biography by Jerry Oppenheimer.
Diana Dill moved to New York and met Kirk Douglas while they were studying acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, Webster said.
She moved to California after signing a contract with Warner Bros. and made her film debut in 1942 in “Keeper of the Flame,” starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, Webster said. She returned to New York to do stage and television and became a Powers Agency model, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
After she landed the cover of Life in May 1943, Kirk Douglas, who was serving in the U.S. Navy, vowed to marry her, according to the Hollywood Reporter. They marched down the aisle under crossed swords in New Orleans in 1943.
She gave birth to their first son, Michael Douglas, in 1944. After their second son, Joel, was born in 1947, the couple began to realize they were not “not right for each other” and divorced in 1951, Kirk Douglas wrote in his 2007 memoir, “Let’s Face It: 90 Years of Living, Loving, and Learning.”
Wanting to give her children a “settled, normal upbringing” outside Hollywood, Webster raised them in Connecticut after the divorce and commuted to New York to work in television and theater, Donald Webster said. She married Broadway producer Bill Darrid in 1956; their marriage ended with his death in 1992.
Her TV credits spanned the decades to include roles big and small in “Naked City,” “Flipper,” “Kung Fu,” “Barnaby Jones,” “Cagney & Lacey,” “Dynasty,” Knots Landing,” “The West Wing” and “ER.” She also had a recurring role on the soap opera “Days of Our Lives” as Martha Evans from 1977 to 1982, and appeared in an episode of “The Streets of San Francisco,” the detective series starring Michael Douglas and Karl Malden that launched her son’s career.
Her last film, “It Runs in the Family” in 2003, was a family reunion of sorts. She played matriarch Evelyn Gromberg opposite Kirk Douglas as her husband. Michael Douglas played her son, and her grandson Cameron Douglas played her grandson.
She married her third husband, Donald Webster, in Bermuda in 2002. The couple met in Washington at a book party for her memoir, Webster said. She was 78 and he was 70.
The couple moved to California and shared “a wonderful late-life marriage,” Webster said. They bonded over a shared passion for writing and encouraged each other’s creative pursuits.
“We just clicked and had a harmonious life together,” he said.
“She had many talents. She had an amazing circle of friends who really loved and cared about her, the kindest people you would meet,” he said. “She was a great lady, truly an exceptional person.”
In addition to Webster, she is survived by her sons Michael and Joel and three grandchildren, Cameron, Dylan and Carys.
